The Headlines - Trump’s Drastic Tariff Turnaround, and Green Card Holders on Edge

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Plus, the soundtrack of America. On Today’s Episode:From ‘Be Cool!’ to ‘Getting Yippy’: Inside Trump’s Reversal on Tariffs, by Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson and Jonathan SwanJohnson Delays Budget Vote As G.O.P. Defectors Balk, by Catie Edmondson, Michael Gold and Maya C. Miller‘Where’s Alex?’ A Beloved Caregiver Is Swept Up in Trump’s Green Card Crackdown, by Miriam JordanWhy Cameras Are Popping Up in Eldercare Facilities, by Paula SpanPop Songs, ‘Hamilton’ and Windows 95 Chime Join National Registry, by Derrick Bryson TaylorTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, April 10th. Here's what we're covering. Walk us through your thinking about why you decided to put a 90-day pause. Well I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.

In an abrupt turnaround yesterday, President Trump announced that he was reversing course on the massive global tariffs he'd put in place just hours after they kicked in. He said the higher tariffs will be on pause for 90 days on almost every country except China, though he's leaving in place his earlier 10 percent tariff on most of America's other trading partners.

Yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy. Trump acknowledged the economic turmoil that his plan had set off, wiping out trillions of dollars from the stock market and triggering an alarming sell-off in U.S. government bonds. Behind the scenes at the White House, his advisors had been increasingly worried that the panic could spiral out of control and cause a financial crisis. But Trump's decision to change course after days of repeatedly saying he wouldn't

was so sudden that many of his top aides only learned about it at the last minute. Some didn't even find out until Trump posted the announcement on social media. The president said that now he is ready to negotiate. The deal is going to be made with every one of them. And they'll be fair deals. I just want fair. They will be fair deals for everybody. Trump said the 90-day pause will give countries time to work out new trade deals with the

U.S. and companies' time to ask for exemptions from the tariffs. When reporters asked the president how he's going to move forward on all of that, Trump suggested he'd be going off his gut and making the decisions instinctively. I mean, you almost can't take a pencil to paper. It's really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else. The stock market obviously liked President Trump's reversal on tariffs. The S&P 500 was up 9.5%. That's the best day of trading since 2008.

But I'm not sure that this does anything much to ease the economic concerns that have been brewing. And it's possible it could even make them worse. Ben Castleman is an economics reporter at the Times. For one thing, President Trump actually increased tariffs on China, even as he delayed implementation of tariffs on other trading partners. And China, of course, is a huge US trading partner and it increasingly looks like we're headed for just an all-out trade war with China. But more importantly, the reversal just reinforces this feeling of uncertainty and chaos and a sense that businesses and consumers just have no idea what the rules of the game are going to be from one day to the next.

Today on The Daily, Times White House reporter Jonathan Swan on how far Trump might go in his economic standoff with China. My sense is quite far and he won't want to be the one to back down first. He can't be happy about this, having to blink and having to put the paws on all of this. So China will assume even more importance. On Capitol Hill, House Republicans are having trouble getting the votes they need for their budget plan.

The House was supposed to vote yesterday on a spending blueprint that President Trump has been pushing them hard to pass. We got to get this big, beautiful deal done. We got to get it done. And get it done now. Don't wait two weeks. But a small, hard-right group of holdouts within the Republican Party could not be swayed. They say they're concerned about the country's growing deficit and they want more spending

cuts. They say they're necessary to offset all the tax cuts that the plan includes. A couple of people want to show, I got to get a little bit more, a little bit more. You know what you're going to get? You end up getting nothing. You end up getting a Democrat bill or worse. In a room off the House floor yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson gathered the GOP defectors for over an hour to try and convince them,

but they didn't blink. We have a small subset of members who weren't totally satisfied with the product of the stand, so we're going to talk about maybe going to conference with Senate or anything. Without enough support to move forward, given the GOP's razor thin margin in the House, Johnson delayed the vote, but insisted they will get the plan passed.

This Republican conference has demonstrated over and over this majority that we deliver when the time comes and we are going to deliver this. So just stay tuned. Johnson said they may try again as soon as today. try again as soon as today. On the immigration front, the Trump administration's aggressive crackdown and promise of mass deportations has been reaching some U.S. residents who never expected to be targeted, green card holders. More than 10 million people have green cards, which allow them to live and work in the U.S. permanently.

But the Times has been tracking how some of them are now facing deportation. Alex and his wife, Anita, were returning from a vacation to El Salvador to visit her family. It was the day after Trump had taken office, and his record popped up in the system. My colleague Miriam Jordan is following the story of Alex Oriana, who's lived in the U.S. since he was four. When Oriana re-entered the U.S. after his recent trip, border officers

flagged an almost decade-old conviction that he had for trying to swindle a store out of $200. While green card holders can be deported for criminal offenses, that kind of low-level crime typically wouldn't have caused any issues. But this time, Oriana ended up getting taken into custody and locked up at a detention center in Texas, where he's facing deportation. Miriam says his unexpected detention has shaken the family. He and his wife are expecting a baby in July. For the moment, they've canceled the baby shower. This case and others I've learned about show that the administration has expanded its enforcement

to people in the country lawfully. That's a universe of millions more immigrants who are suddenly worried, because green card holders normally assume that it's just like one step from being a citizen, but now they're realizing that without citizenship, you're still vulnerable. Around the country, there's a growing battle around the use of cameras in senior care facilities. In recent years, more and more families have been installing cameras in their loved one's rooms, both to check in on them and to look out for abuse or neglect. In a high-profile case in Minnesota, one family secretly installed

a camera in their mother's apartment at an assisted living facility. On the footage, they saw that staff were repeatedly ignoring her and then berating her. The family went on to push lawmakers to pass one of the country's first laws protecting families' rights to install cameras like they did. At least 17 other states have now passed similar laws. But many facilities and industry groups have been pushing back. They've called the cameras an invasion of privacy for staff and residents. One elder care expert told the Times the surveillance can also have the effect of unfairly treating the staff as suspects.

Overall, experts say that cameras can only catch problems with elder care, not fix them in the first place, and that taking care of the country's rapidly aging population will require more staffing, better training, be officially preserved for the future? This week, the Library of Congress announced its newest picks for the National Recording Registry, which archives art that it says is culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Among this year's entries, there's

everything from Roy Rogers to Elton John to Celine Dion to Mary J. Blige. The oldest pick this year was the 1913 Hawaiian song Aloha Ooi. The most recent is the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton. But the real banger that the Library of Congress is preserving is this gem. That's the 1995 Microsoft Windows reboot chime written by musician Brian Eno, actually. Apparently, he composed 84 different versions for the company. Personally, I'm more into the Windows XP shutdown sound from 2001. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.